Will Northern Virginia, frustrated by Richmond’s inattention to its highway woes, secede from the commonwealth? AOL’s Stephen M. Case raises the question. Don’t dismiss the possibility so quickly. While Virginia may be rightly famous for many things, it is also infamous for a number more. Slavery is one; Jim Crow is another. Still one more is the fact that Virginia is the only state which itself has actually experienced a secession.

I know what I am talking about. I spent part of my childhood in West Virginia and had to study state history in school. Not only do I know how to spell "rhododendron," but I know that on Oct. 24, 1861, voters in the western part of Virginia decided overwhelmingly to split away from the Old Dominion. They called their new state Kanawha at first, but later took on the name "West Virginia." Unlike their Virginia cousins, the Mountaineers fought officially on the side of the Union during the Civil War.

Why did they secede? The official reason was that West Virginians took the moral high road and opposed slavery. But just as in the Northern Virginian’s case, the real reasons were the keen economic and social differences between the two. Hard-bitten mountain men and women who survived by farming and hunting in the hills had little in common with the landed and pretentious gentry from the lowlands who ran the show in Richmond.

There’s some similarity today to Northern Virginia, where the leaders of the high-tech revolution, frankly, don’t have that much in common with the downstate crowd. They tend to be well-heeled entrepreneurs from somewhere else, who were educated in the school of independent thinking and self-aggrandizement. Many of the downstaters are lawyers and business people from mid and small-sized towns who cut their teeth on the pay-as-you-go fiscal policies of the Harry F. Byrd political machine.

Will Northern Virginia secede? Of course not. But there’s nothing new about people in the Old Dominion disagreeing with Richmond so vehemently that they say goodbye. Their feelings can be best summed up by West Virginia’s motto: "Mountaineers are always free."